... was eventually to be found in marine strata exposed in Russia, the Crimea, Georgia, along a long area of the Black Sea, all the way to Japan and New Zealand; it was found along the east coast ... catastrophically fast. Catastro-phism was a failed nineteenth-century theory, and none of the pow-erful, mid-career European paleontologists of the early 1980s and very few of the Americans, ... would again see the cliffs of Zumaya. But life has a funny way of changing things, and perhaps it is just as well that we cannot see the future. THE MASS EXTINCTIONS WERE SUCH LARGE-SCALE AFFAIRS...